No! Training ants to sort tiny screws, of course. 
[Beavis] Heh-heh-heh. He said ‘screws’. Heh-heh. [/Beavis]
The international body for aerospace records is the FAI. They have divided aircraft and spacecraft into literally hundreds of separate classes, each with its own set of records.
A simplistic statement like “fixed wing means what I say it means” is not relevant.
Here’s a link to their records page. http://www.fai.org/records. From here you can dig around for hours if you’re somebody who gets into obscure trivia. Here’s a randomly selected example: http://records.fai.org/general_aviation/current.asp?id1=127&id2=4
I don’t think so - the entire wing moves to provide propulsion.
Oddly enough, I don’t really know what makes a “fixed wing” a “fixed wing”. I do recognize a rotorcraft easily enough. And then there are things like hang-gliders and trikes which are off on their own - they’re called various things like “weight-shift” and “flex-wing”. You have “para-whatsis” - the parachutes, parasails, and paraplanes with use a parafoil as a means of support. Ornithoptors. Lighter-than-air blimps and zepplins and balloons and so forth. Flying wings. There is some weird stuff flying around out there.
Then you have weird stuff like the Osprey - is an Osprey fixed wing or rotorcraft or hybrid?
Anyhow, someone has apparently determined that SS1 is a fixed-wing rocket-propelled airplane. Spaceship. Aerospaceplane.
(Do we need a new name/category?)
Well, the FAA has created a category for the Osprey. I believe it is “tilt-rotor”.
Brian
The ornithopter question was mostly wiseass/rhetorical but it gives food for thought. I think the discussion clears in my mind what fixed wing means. I defnine it as an aircraft which does not need the lifting surfaces to move relative to the airframe in order to fly. Variable geometry such as swing wings, scissor wings and even ordinary flaps only serve to widen the flight envelope.
Mind you I’m talking about generic categories, not the regulatory or performance record categories we’ve also been talking about. In that respect I’d have to call Rogallo type hang gliders and parafoils to be fixed wing. Yeah, yeah, I know they are not rigid wings but any flexing of the wing surface is just incidental to the structural design as the movement is not what makes it fly. Yes, ram-air parachutes change shape to steer but that makes it no less a fixed wing than a plane with moveable ailerons. Would you say the Wright flyer is not fixed wing because it warped the shape to turn?
Not an aeronautical engineer by any stretch, but wouldn’t the difference be that a fixed wing aircraft creates lift by the movement of the aircraft. In other words, a fixed wing craft like Spaceship One, the Wright Flyer, or an F-14 may be able to move parts, or all of their wings, but unless they are moving, diddly squat in the way of lift is created.
ON the other hand, rotary wing craft create lift by the movement of the wing itself (the rotor blade on a helo are basicly long thin wings)
Or am I way off base here?You are correct Sweetums but that’s not the complete list of aircraft. Some, like ornithopters, are in neither category and some such as the Osprey can logically be in fixed wing or rotary categories or even both depending on flight mode. I know the FAA made a completely separate category but that is for regulation purposes and those categories have no meaning outside of the FAA’s jurisdiction. Some things cannot be put into one category that is mutually exclusive from every other category. In the real world you sometimes need a venn diagram with overlapping categories.
Heck, I hoped that someone would debate me on calling hang gliders and parafoils fixed wing 
Seeing SS1, the Pegasus and the X-15 leads me to wonder why it’s such an advantage to piggy back your spacecraft on a larger plane up to 30-40,000 feet for a trip up to 350,000 feet. You only get a small part of the distance up, your not relying on your wings for lift so you don’t need the other plane to get up to speed, gravity isn’t noticably weaker at 35,000 feet. Why wasn’t SS1 just launched from the ground like NASA’s space shuttle is?
At 5km you wind up being above half the atmosphere’s mass.
So it’s an air-resistance thing?
Kind of. SS1 uses a rocket engine. That means it needs to carry it’s oxidizer with it. That will increase the ships mass and either reduce what it can carry into space or cause it to get bigger with the accompanying need to deal with all the new mass needing energy to get into space.
The WhiteKight is a typical (gorgeous) plane that uses the atmosphere as the oxidizer. Consequently its lift capabilities are wider than that of SS1. So use it to get above the thickest bit of the atmosphere and then use your rockets to blast a hole in the atmosphere.
I’d be curious to see if anyone looked at the pay back for getting above 75% of the atmosphere.
5 days? Correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the first flight approximately 2 months ago?
Wasn’t that the first flight to reach orbit?
-confused
None of the flights have reached orbit. The first flight to exceed 100 kilometers (and therefore officially be a space flight) was in June, but that wasn’t SpaceShip One’s first flight, and wasn’t part of the actual attempt to win the X Prize. It was part of a series of test flights they made, each one pushing the envelope further to check out how well the craft operated.
The two flights that officially met the requirements for the X Prize were made on Wendsday September 29th and Monday October 4th.
Not air resistance, exactly. Pure rockets suck in atmosphere. They lift straight up, not using their speed to generate any lift. They carry their own oxidiser, instead of using all that free air out there. A plane is much more efficient in atmosphere than a rocket can ever be.
A rocket is a geometrical nightmare. If it takes (for example) 10 kilos of fuel to lift 10 kilos from 10,000 to 11,000 metres, then you have to lift that fuel plus the rocket from 9,000 to 10,000, using 20 kilos of fuel. Then you have to lift all that 40 kilos from 8 to 9,000, using 40 kilos. Then that 80 kilos from 7-8,000 etc. (I know my maths is very simplified, ok?) What this means is taking even a small distance off the bottom of the pyramid with a plane can turn out to be a significant saving in fuel required, which means less rocket infrastucture to carry it, etc. Think of the plane as a first stage booster, that doesn’t get thrown away, and is much more efficient than most.
DancingFool
Thanks for the answers Grey and Dancing Fool.
So if I were to build something to take several people into orbit, it would have to be substantially larger then SS1 to carry all that extra fuel, plus life support. Could they still use the same design? It seems that a large enough craft would take a huge plane to haul it up to 30,000.
I’ve heard their going to continue this project, aiming for something that could haul tourists into orbit. Does anyone know if the basic design for such a craft would have to boost from the ground, be released by a huge plane or use it’s own wings and jet engines to reach 30,000?
Dancing Fool made some good points about rocket planes vs purely ballistic rockets. I thought the analogy of the mother plane being a first stage was very apt.
The record for a plane taking off under it’s own power from the ground is only about 123k feet, far short of any definition of spaceflight. That was a fighter jet with an auxiliary rocket engine. I don’t think this type of spaceflight will be possible until scramjets are in a high stage of development.
Ahhhh! That’s what I was wondering about! Thanks for clearing it up! I thought something was weird about that, because I understood the requirements for the X Prize and thought it odd that it didn’t fly again for months. So it was only one of a series of progressive test flights back June. I suppose the media made things a bit worse by not stating it as such.